Things have definitely changed, and I can’t quite put my finger on it. The generation one up from me – survivors and refugees – had a certain depth to them, an ability to engage with reality without slogans or “ideologies.” Also a feeling that “we’re all yidden” and a dislike of machlokes.
That seems to be lost now. The volume is up, in speech, in dress, in the whole mode of “Look at me! I’m FRUM!”
The words may be different, but the “tone of voice” that I’m reading here and in other places is strident in the same way that some of the revolutionary types of the ’60’s proclaimed their moral superiority over everyone else.
Why there should be this change of tone I don’t know. Perhaps because people growing up here have never known real anti-Semitism? I hear that cry over and over again, but where else can a Jew sue over being fired for wearing a yarmulkeh? We have rights here that we never had before, and we take them for granted, or as an entitlement. People seem to have forgotten that we’re still in Golus.